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August 2, 2016

Leaning into the Unknowable

Photo by Scanlon Carter Photography

I
recently had two very beautiful women come and visit me in my home to interview
and photograph me about my practice as an artist living in the Upper Yarra Valley.
The day prior to their arrival I reached for the phone many times to call and
cancel their coming, with many internal voices chattering in my mind. The voices
said that I'm not really an artist, that I am too distracted by the endless
tasks of motherhood and too enslaved by domestic drudgery to still call myself
an artist, that I'm too heavy and morose to offer anything life-giving to their
project, the narrative of my winter having been the grappling in the
labrynthine darkness of my underworld, attempting to befriend the Minotaur,
grappling at the interface of the seeker, red-thread in hand, and the abandoned and outcast aspects of my own psyche. In the face of this I was feeling
altogether not sparkly enough, not successful enough, not productive and
polished enough to be interviewed.

The
ask of this meeting brought me face to face with the fraudulent feelings I have
whenever I am asked to state my occupation. I write "Mother and
Artist" or "Artist and Mother", but really who do I think I am
kidding, to think that either of these activities were a "proper"
occupation, despite the fact that they have wrung every ounce of effort and
persistent force of will, blood, sweat and tears from my being for the
majority of my adult life. I thought that maybe in coming they wouldl feel
obliged to include me in their project, and despite my obvious inadequacy,
would feel obliged to include me rather than hurt my feelings, so that maybe I
should save them from the discomfort of having to either reject or tolerate
me.....

Another,
deeper part resisted the urge to hide under my bushel and so by default of my not following through on any phone calls, they arrived
on my doorstep on a Friday morning and I ended up having a beautiful morning of
conversation and connection, delightfully losing myself in the fumbling
attempts to articulate the bones of things that are often left unspoken
to.

I
wrote this in the aftermath of their visit, grateful for the questions and the
quality of listening that asked for more of me, rather than less. These are
some of the ways that I feel I am an artist, regardless of success or
productivity, these are some of the ways I come to belong to myself.

"I
feel that at its best, the experience of making art, song, poetry, or at least
the receiving of the inspiration for these things, is a deep listening at the
interface of self and that which is beyond the self, a moving towards what is
vulnerable and unformed, tender and ephemeral, in order to receive something
new about oneself or the condition of life. Often the things received in this
place are far from grandiose visions of salvation but rather gentle and
intimate homecomings, private revelations of understanding about the patterns
and shapes of our wounds and our gifts, and a sensing of what the balm might
be.

I
feel we have so much to learn at this time about how to bring ourselves as a
people into a greater balance and a deeper respect for our planet and for all
living things, I feel we have so direly lost our way and that the answers for
how we can reclaim our integrity will not come from what we already know, but
from what we are gifted by our attuned listening, our stillness in the moment,
in our receptivity to a higher wisdom, in our capacity to sensitively receive
guidance from that great creative river of life. We will learn to protect the
earth by deeply listening to the consciousness of the Earth itself. She will
teach us.

In
a sense there comes to be a leaning into the unknowable, a moving across the
threshold of what is known, to see what medicine we can find there. There is
less and less agenda for me, and more of a seeking of what feels in my body to
be true. This is not an easy thing in this time, it is my daily task to bring
myself to this endeavour of embodying into the moment and receiving the
inspiration that life is asking to birth in me, rather than attending to the
thousand and one distractions that pull me away from what is deeply true. And
many days I fall short, many days I sleepwalk through, full of forgetting,
believing in lack and the separation, my shame or stories of blame.

I
feel that there is a great deal of trauma that exists in the bodies of many of
us in this modern world, and for me my art practice has been a way of speaking
to what it is that exists beneath the experience of trauma, I feel that I am
asked to source the remedy for my own disconnection, I am asked to break
through my complacency and humbly drink from the wellspring of creation. It
feels to me that there is a sense of personal salvation that opens to me when I
open myself to receive from the beyond, from nature and the earth beneath me
and all around me, and the vast and mysterious cosmos above me, to be alive to
the way that life is asking us to be made anew in every moment, to create for
ourselves, in sovereignty, a new reality that serves the whole of
creation.

I
would like to surrender more deeply into this process of creativity, to come
more deeply into this service to creation, be more courageous at the threshold,
to become more comfortable with the feeling of annihilation in the wake of
belonging less to the world and more to the void of creative potential, have
less fear and less need to control and say yes more deeply and more often to
losing myself to the making new.

There
is always a great deal of discomfort for me at the beginning of a creative
birthing, a battling with distraction and lethargy and complacency, requiring a
force of will that feels momentous to muster. And then always for me the
finishing of a piece of art is very similar in feeling to falling in love. It
holds that sense of elation and wonder, of madness and joy, of open hearted
recognition and devotion, as though a part of myself that had been buried and
unformed has been made visible to me, brought from darkness into light, born of
the heart and life-giving.

There
is a part of me that endeavours through my creative expression to become the
channel that is open to receiving life's capacity to create itself anew,
cultivating an attunement of the psyche to receive a gift from the mytho-poetic
strata of life, a willingness and capacity to be blind and unseeing in the
realms of shadow and of grief, facing one's own discomfort to become more deeply
at home in oneself. I feel that art and life are inseparable in this sense, the
art a distillation of the living one does, an expression of where one's
attention has been in all the moments of our days.

What
matters to me now as an artist seems to be more about what matters to me as a
human, inseparable from productivity, the valuing of the beingness behind it.
How do I make myself a receptive instrument for divine guidance, sick of the
inadequacies of my limited solutions, defence mechanisms, self protections? How
do I let go and trust that there is a magnificence at work that I am worthy of
receiving? What is life most deeply asking of me at this time? And what am I
carrying that impedes the flow of creation through the bones of my being?

I
feel I have lived much of my life from outside of my body, often very
disassociated, conditioned as we all are in our modern world by an
individualistic intellectualism, deeply saturated in an underbelly of grief for
what has been lost. In the vacuum of my own uncertainty a deep keening arises,
for true intimacy and authenticity.

As
I have journeyed deeper into this life I have discovered that all the magic
comes when I enter deeply into the body, into the dance, into the heart and the
womb and to the web of life, within which I am embedded. It is as simple as
this really, this coming home to a deeper more embodied, more embedded self.
But this has been momentous work for me, it has taken all I have.

My
creative offerings are the gifts, alongside the children I have birthed, that
my body has given me when I have stopped long enough to listen. They are the
microcosmic gifts that may or may not reflect something at work in the greater
macrocosm, but which I offer up all the same, as the only true thing I have
learnt about what matters in this life."

You are so beautiful Lucy. You wear your art like a wondrous weave of gossamer silk - your garment evident to all it would seem but the artist herself. Sweet woman, those are bright garnet stars you shine on this dark night of the soul for humanity. Thank you.

dear Lucy... although we know not each other well, the feeling of your art heart reaches out thru' the ages... you are a Sacred Sage - your words are of the Magical Muses of Millenia.... lovingly, Ona Henderson xX

"Beloved Kin, dear ones with eyes that would see and hearts wide enough to forgive the short-comings, I ask that you bear witness to this trepidatious birthing of a part of myself into the world. I offer this because I feel it asked of me in the wee hours of my dark nights, because it is what I am most afraid of and because it is what I want most for myself; to give of that which moves within. The place in which I find myself at the commencement of this endeavour , and what I feel moved to share from that place, feels deeply raw and vulnerable, but beneath the fear of revealing my underbelly is a gentle beckoning to share with the world that which I truly feel myself to be, both that which shines boldly and sings of truth and radiant becoming, and that which dwells yet in the shadow places within, a whisper to unveil the unformed and the as yet unlived, the deep and the dark of me. It is my prayer that something of the truth of this might touch something in the truth of you, so that I might know myself more deeply and so that a shared becoming may come to flower in the space between us, in the space between the within and the beyond. I give my heartfull thanks for your reflection and beholding"